We’re hosting Celebrity MasterChef by mistake!

Welcome to the grand opening of The MasterChef Egg Drawer!

Signature vs Nurture

The good ship Theseus’s MasterChef once again docks at our ports and the latest additions to its shiny hull being bespoke personalised license plates!

but most excitingly, they have a balcony now!

oh, and Giorgio Locatelli is now The Male Judge™ but, THE BALCONY! And showing up with a new face lift every series isn’t the only thing they’re taking from Drag Race – there are now pin badges available and I MUST HAVE ONE

it’s all going very MasterChef Australia, which I quite enjoy and look forward to seeing. The celebrity version is the perfect part of the franchise to test out new and intriguing format changes. Now we just have to wait and see if they take my letters about bringing back Ye Olde Classic Invention Test or replacing at least one contestant with one of those unrehabilitable parrots that know how to swear really violently seriously.
But back to Giorgio before I got distracted by the new balustrade installation

I was intrigued to see what sort of persona he’d take on for the show, and I’m sure having the last two men associated with this franchise catapulted into the sun (or the Mediterranean to go and consult with a charitable pizza oligarch in the case of Wallace?????) at least somewhat influenced the decision to be as nice and nurturing as possible. It was a great debut for him and he worked fantastically with Grace, who continues to be one of the best dressed people on television

I would like a tour of her earring collection. But the best combination of personalities all episode was Giorgio Locatelli making first contact with the enigma that is Joe Pasquale as he more than liberally bled all over his workbench

it is unclear whether or not the blood was one of the 32 ingredients going into his medical malpractice pie

and he was very dedicated to the role of mad scientist as he butchered his beef with scissors

the pie was called Frankenstein’s Pie because, as the 32 ingredients and 1 bodily fluid should tip you off, it’s a bit of everything haphazardly stitched together and looks slightly like a shambling corpse kept in the Victorian sewage system because it doesn’t belong amongst civilised society

and somehow, I can’t say that it doesn’t not look delicious? And it apparently was as Joe Pasquale touches the MasterChef divine of being genuinely mad as 32 frogs in a box but also actually quite talented and sincere about the whole thing – the perfect Celebrity MasterChef contestant! But I also love Emily Campbell because my favourite sport in the world is absolutely hench women lifting and/or throwing heavy objects while looking the happiest anyone could ever be in the world

I had a great time watching the hammer toss over the weekend

for her dish, Emily was pspspspspspspspsing Taco Discourse into the MasterChef kitchen as she made a batch of Jerk Chicken Tacos

which do look lovely and it was all going so well as apparently we’ve had our wrists slapped enough times to correctly differentiate between knowing when to use the word Tortilla and when to use to the word Taco

and then we promptly slipped down the taco chute (grim phrase, I am sincerely sorry) with a misidentification so all the good will bought by Mexico Week on Sewing Bee is lost

don’t worry, everyone has to eat mouthfuls of mustard in a little bit and I think that’s retribution enough. The keeping of the Taste Test (sans cubed egg) is maybe the wildest format decision, I get why it’s here but it’s really not very good television and I love that for them.

The only real issue that Emily had with her tacos was that her chicken was a little dry and the mango salsa wasn’t making up enough for it, so Grace probably didn’t need to be dressed for Taco Time

as celebrities continue to wage a war against the very concept of an accompanying sauce. Except for Joe Pasquale who makes a mean gravy

based on Joe’s reaction, it is unclear if the gravy was meant to be spicy

I want an anthropological study into Joe Pasquale – he delights and fascinates me.

Emily wasn’t the only one to have issues with dry chicken as Shakira Khan, the obligatory Love Islander of the series, just lumped everything in a pot and hoped it would all cook at the same time

but her dry chicken was not the killer on her dish as you see that out of focus mass at the back and think “Oh, she looks to have made a lovely little pithivier!”

only for it to actually be her mass of congealed rice that Tony Hawk could perform a kick-flip with

and she immediately goes into the Terrible Rice Hall of Fame because I didn’t even know you could force rice into such a texture. But she wasn’t the only one trying to fluff up a kitchen sponge

as Jason Mohammad’s rice was also overly compacted, although still identifiable as rice as opposed to Shakira’s that I might have guessed was rice if you gave me 50 guesses

but while his rice wasn’t great, the judges did absolutely love his Keema and and entire bush of mint leaves

out of everyone, he seemed to be the most comfortable and confident in the kitchen, whereas Jay McGuiness sort of stood shivering behind his stove like a Romanian rescue dog going through its rehabilitation phase and an expression that read like his agent made him do this

but they managed to coax a smile out of him using cheese and some unauthorised cognitive behavioural therapy roleplay

his signature dish was a Vegetarian Tofu Chilli which he was serving with a Flatbread and a Parmesan Crisp

and it apparently tasted very nice! I don’t think it’s that hard to mess up a chilli, except for that time I grated 3 carrots into one for some reason? I think I was going through psychosis at the time. However, Jay was disappointed by the vertical reach of his slop

if it needs a boost, Shakira as a stepping stool made of rice you can just put under it like the tier of a wedding cake made of Styrofoam – a practice we need to outlaw.

An Unofficial Signature Dish Ranking:
1. Somehow, Joe Pasquale
2. Jay’s Vertically Challenged Self-deprecating Slop
3. J-Mo’s K-ma
4. A New Dawn of Taco Discourse
5. Shakira’s Laws of Physics Defying Rice (Also A Curry)

Getting Saucey

So, last series everyone thought I was making up the cubed egg taste test as a fun and quirky little Bit™ for the blog – shout out to everyone who reads the blog without having watched the shows!

and I just need to make it absolutely clear, I am not making up Grace and Giorgio holding the celebrities up and gunpoint and making them eat teaspoons of mustard until their stomachs started trying to unionise against them

to be fair, it’s also very much on the celebrities for gobbing down a pot of wholegrain mustard that is very much identifiable by look alone

Jay was the the first to fall as I imagine he realised he was staring down the barrel of at least 3 different kinds of mustard and several chilli sauces so grabbed the safest best: the upsetting ramekin of pond water

which was the joker amongst the pack, and the only one that Giorgio had not correctly guessed himself (RELEASE THE GIORGIO CUT OF THIS GAME!)

the answer being a Green Tomatillo that Jay had hazarded a guess of Salsa Verde for and we might need a second or third opinion on the decision to eliminate him

we regret to announce that the Taste Test has been put under a steward’s enquiring.

There really isn’t much to write about – Emily Campbell fell to not knowing what Gochujang is, Jason was betrayed by Sriracha Sauce

only for the Sriracha Sauce to be Joe Pasquale’s winning ramekin

and for this, Joe wins an advantage in the next round which is definitely an advantage, don’t worry about it.

Class Is In Session

The first tragedy of the MasterChef Soft Reboot is that the food truck challenge has been taken out back and shot in the head because we’ve fully exhausted every iteration of a cheeseburger. The replacement for it is a Giorgio Locatelli MasterClass that the contestants have to follow along with

and you might think that the advantage that Joe Pasquale won for eating two kinds of mustard would be a little one-on-one time with Giorgio or, I don’t know, forcing everyone else to have to cook on their knees

but no, his advantage was getting the station directly in front of Giorgio

Joe seemed as sceptical of this “advantage” as I was

and my favourite part was him having to give a statement in the MasterChef backrooms about how it had definitely helped him with the distinct feeling that whoever was behind the camera was pointing a glock at him

because during the Masterclass, Giorgio still went around and interfered with everyone, or at least stopped Jason from consuming an entire series worth of flour in one fell swoop

and they could just walk up to his bench and see what he’d done

ARE THE RULES NOT SACRED?

The subject of this masterclass of lawlessness was Gnocchi in a Vegetable and Goat’s Cheese Sauce garnished with a liberal use of truffle

and the outcome for everyone was mostly positive, there were only small errors. Or in the case of Jason, boulder-sized vaguely gnocchi shaped errors

my favourite part was the shameless attempt for brownie points and prompt dismissal because Giorgio will not have his name tarnished by these barbarously cut carrots

this is honestly one of the most savage reads in MasterChef history – get Giorgio Locatelli on Drag Race immediately.

While Jason served Capital “D” Dinner, Jay McGuiness had invented the miniature Gnocchette

and that wasn’t the only invention as Emily cut the ribbon for the MasterChef Egg Drawer

Christopher Nolan eat your heart out, the best camerawork of the year was for whichever camera operator perfectly caught the egg sliding off her flour and perfectly panned up to Emily freezing in the hope nobody had just witnessed any of this

I truly don’t think I’ve laughed harder at anything on MasterChef since Lisa Snowdon being incredulous over James Buckley serving her three chocolate truffles on a saucer

I am never not thinking about this, it occupies all the space in my brain that being able to remember my banking information should.

The star pupil was Shakira, who was having a wonderful bit of beginners luck as she’d never encountered gnocchi before this very moment

but it also seemed like she’d never encountered cooked vegetables before

someone didn’t fry onions at university just to make the bad thoughts go away AND IT SHOWS. My flatmates had to play a wonderful game of “do we need to have an intervention or is she just making dinner?” every night.
Shakira’s gnocchi ended up being the best in the room, Joe Pasquale really squandered that ability to make direct eye contact, huh? And her prize for this was the aforementioned MasterChef pin-badge

which again is promised to give another GREAT advantage

there’s a 40% chance she just gets to have the £5.50 Tesco Meal Deal instead of the £3.50 one during the lunch break – I don’t know, despite them dropping all three episodes on Iplayer, I refuse to watch ahead before recapping because I am a terrestrial TV purist. But also, I’m very tempted to watch all of Sandcastle Bake Off in one go while developing a drinking game to along with it.